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Video: God: Lazy or OCD???

I’m definitely still experimenting with styles. In this case I have decided to post the exact transcript here. It would be nice to find a way to have what’s said on the video and the text on my blog complement each other instead of being the exact same thing, but I’m starting with a verbatim copy.

I wanted to make a video on something I just thought of, which is why God is lazy. Proof of why God is lazy. I guess it’s somewhat controversial to say that, but here’s the thing. If God did exist and he had the power to create the universe, and he had a great conscience, a very good Will, and the power to apply that Will, why would he make a bunch of rules which were always obeyed in the universe, unless he was too lazy to be bothered with thinking of new rules?

I’m talking about the laws of physics here.

God is lazy because It, or He, uses the same rules all the time for physical reality, and can’t be bothered to use new ones. For example, instead of making something interesting happen to a given asteroid, it is allowed to float for hundreds of millions of years in the same stupid orbit.

But what do I mean when I say ‘lazy’? Is lazy always such a bad thing? How do I distinguish laziness from apathy, in which God just doesn’t care? Maybe laziness is where you don’t work hard even if you do care, whereas apathy is where you don’t work hard, but only on the things that you don’t care about.

In that case, I can’t say that God is completely lazy, because He’s not lazy in all of the areas concerned. After all, when it comes to actually executing the rules, He’s quite the opposite of lazy. Unlike a human being who’s trying to assemble an interesting video, the god who executes the laws of nature never fails to execute them with the utmost perfection. This God does the exact same things to all particles, at all times, so completely thoroughly that He is more the type you would accuse of obsessive compulsive disorder rather than laziness.

And yet he also seems lazy – why put so much effort into obeying such a small set of physical laws instead of coming up with new ones to suit the needs of the situation? It appears that either He doesn’t have the creative capacity to imagine news laws, or that He simply lacks the willpower to do so. Either way, it would appear that God is extremely OCD when applying the laws, and extremely lazy when it comes to creating new ones.

Oh, and by the way, I’m not the kind of person who will sit around and allow God to know the answer while I remain in the dark. When I ask a question, I never end it with, “Well, that’s something that only God can know. Why would I ask it if I was willing to accept that something I can hardly see would know the answer. Anyway, back to the topic.

So why does God seem so unconcerned with the rules themselves, and yet, so obsessive with the application of the rules?

It’s almost seems as if God has enslaved himself to his own rules! It is as if the God who executes the laws of nature committed some mortal sin ealry on in His divine career, and was expelled from the garden of Eden… or whatever the “God” version of the garden of Eden is, and is now forced to apply these rules for all eternity, in exactly the same way. I mean, any human who was forced to obey such a small set of rules over such a long period of time and over such a vast area would certainly feel he had been enslaved by the cruelest of masters.

The sheer amount of disdain exhibited by the creator [the lazy creator] of the rules for whatever God was subsequently forced to enact them [for all eternity], to my mind lends plausibility to someone who is inclined to believe in polytheism. The evident nonchalance with which the rules were created compared to the astounding diligence with which they were subsequently executed suggests two different Gods, the lazy one and the OCD one. The contrast between these two gods is so stark that the only reason I am initially inclined to consider them as one God is because of the history of monotheism and the common cultural background of the modern times. However, if I do choose to consider both of these gods as the same god, and I amalgamate the total laziness compared to the total OCD-ness, then I guess I end up a little bit in the middle. In other words, it would appear God is, in totality, neither completely lazy nor completely OCD.

However, I can’t avoid the feeling that, in merging these two gods, I am simply papering over what is genuinely such a great difference that polytheism – the idea of two Gods – is just as easily plausible as monotheism.